A while ago, my boyfriend left me.Bella says it's sexy that I go around my small circle in town saying, “He broke up with me.He left me.He quit.”Sexy, but I don't know how not to: he didn't leave, and he wasn't my boyfriend.He was my fiancé.He stays in, deep in, a granite fissure in Manhattan.I stay in Minnesota and go out.I go out to meet the girls—old girls, new.We go on, trifling with language that's in use for us.Hot, cool, loving women with not cool, loving husbands or with hot, cool, loving boyfriends or with no husband or boyfriend: duende fora season or a reason for a while.

“You don't like the word ‘cunt,'” my fiancé said judiciously.“I like it but not as a first name,” I said.

Bella shows me a heavy, beaded necklace that matches my boots—beige-tipped and turquoise-shafted, the turquoise color not visible under jeans.I bought the jeans already tattered so I wouldn't have to wait for them, but they are all cotton without added stretch, so I wait anyway, stand around cased in them, dropping pounds walking and talking ceaselessly in them, talking and walking, while the air in the rooms turns pale red. He'd spy me dancing to paragraphs, gorging on beer then pizza yet growing loose and looser in the limbs until I feel like a girl again, a go-girl on a budget, a Gidget, a gadget.Yes, I say to Bella:I'll take the beads and black wool wrap with alpaca feathers and peacock brooch starred with crystals.I wind the stole around my jeans and pin the peacock at my hip.The wrap swings like a thick skirt over the jeans and beige boots.The peacock sparkles.They say and it is: subject for a runway.

. . .

Bella tells a story about a woman, an acquaintance, who came into the boutique with her boyfriend, the woman smelling of an STD.We perk up, listen.What STD?The smelly one, Bella says.The one with impossible syllables no one has heard of. The men of the north reject condoms and motorcycle helmets. The law permits you to break your head.

We walk to the Narrows from the boutique, fortified by talk of men and fashion. The Narrows is a blues bar known for outbreaks of small violence. I am wearing the winter white swing coat I bought for the wedding and the gold and turquoise beads.

A crowd parts to assess us. We take our seats at the corner of the bar. At the boutique we drank vodka. If I want to kill myself, but I don't, not here, not now, I'll order red wine. I ask for a Stella. A handsome man is already sitting next to me. I eye him as I shimmy in. He has beady green eyes. We go straight to politics. He is a Republican who lives on the Lake and commutes to Wall Street. Here, I am not surrounded by liberals on a sofa. Liberals are irresponsible dreamers who know nothing about finance, he says. I am not a liberal I tell him, but a leftist, a feministe. I hate abortion—keep it legal, I say. I am wearing the sapphire ring. I have no friends and no enemies.My fiancé left me, I say.

An hour of this, a radio hour of talk-fucking, his green eyes boring into me, he leaves, and I turn, isolated. “He's married!” I say to Jen. “After I invested an hour in it.”Jen laughs and repeats to Bella what I say.Bella has to leave.It's ten.I move to her seat and into the brown eyes of a bald man shorter than I, a Libertarian distributor of faux tin ceiling panels. He sails in summer, ice boats in winter. I am a leftist and a feministe, I tell him.My fiancé left me.When we get up to dance, I feel drunk, but he holds me at the waist, and my legs kick out freely on the tiles.

. . .

If I get caught drinking and driving, I'll go to jail for a year.I tell the man with the brown eyes to drive us.Where are we going?To his house, he tells me.His friend, also named Tom, gets in the backseat.That Tom wears tiny spectacles, and I think that I have gotten it backward and that the glasses-Tom is the intellectual, but what if none of us is?I put on the seatbelt.

At Tom's the other Tom says good night in the driveway, and we go upstairs to where a clean white dog with beige spots and beautiful brown eyes is watching us.Tom leads me to a black leather couch in one of the living rooms.He strips me: boots, jeans, swing coat, beads.In moments, he's in me. He's not large, not small, slick. This—that—entry—is raison d'etre. “Clean as a whistle,” I say to the air, meaning no organisms, the organisms you can feel on contact. "Tight,” he says.

My fiancé said,“It was like having sex with the Holland Tunnel to be fucking Diana. My wife that was sex in a monkey patch.But sex with you is the sweetest, snuggest space.”

I'm glad Tom rolls me over and buffs me again. I call out in the dark that I'm a Jamaican.Another man comes near the room and stands in the door.He says something, but I miss it.I don't know who the other man is, but I see his shadow watching us.I wish the second man would come in, but there is only thought across the distance.Later Tom tells me it's his foster son.Tom is 61.

. . .

I wake in the bed looking out at a giant golden maple, not knowing what town we are in.“What town is this?” I ask Tom, and he tells me but I forget.He answers my next thought, "I can't get you pregnant." Then he says he is going to make mass. It is Sunday morning.

. . .

At breakfast, Kevin, who is 23, tall, dark, and impressive, sees me in the light.“I thought you were African when I heard you,” he says.“British and Swedish,” I tell him.“I might be Arab,” he says.

I listen again to Tom's speech. He didn't say "mass." He said "mast." He is going to make a mast.

Comments

i like this-it left me scratching my balding head and checking my eye color. i like how you used eyes to establish a thread and feed us colors until, at the end, you don't have to say it anymore because kevin's eyes, of course, are black.

Thanks, Katrina, Finnegan, Sam, Susan, and Gary for reading and spotting. One friend wrote that "handsome" should appear once, not twice, and that I should use semi-colons instead of colons. I told her I'd read a brilliant essay arguing against the semi-colon so had switched suddenly to colon. Another poet compared overuse of punctuation to head lice. I wrote this short story in two days and spent a full day on the second longer paragraph. I can tell. I admire compression that requires rereading a very short piece. That makes a story clever. Though "Fiancee" is not long, it's not so compressed (except in that paragraph) that it requires rereading. I want it to be round as well as linear. I wish I had the circumflex.

this is wild and interesting and well put together, kind of like a string of glass beads, very pretty how they catch the light and you're waiting for them to slam against a surface and shatter, or the string to break and that splatter of color across the floor--very well done

Thanks, Ajay and Jack. Susan, I'm so glad for your remark. As soon as I read it, I could see what you mean. The beads are a metaphor waiting to happen. The story is a set-up for a shattering, caught in a stay of grace.

not compressed, but dense, such a complex character created in a short amt of time. The frequency of "I" throughout, but particularly in the bar scene, felt very true for this character's voice, the fragility, the false bravado.

This is like listening to a radio. A radio in another room. You're going to sleep, drifting, and someone is changing channels a lot but what you hear makes a better sense than if it were just a program. You have the feeling that everything is all right because there are new calm words for distressing states of being and that is comforting.

I wrote a long comment and lost it after trying to write an individual message which I also lost. (I must learn the system) (I will try and recreate my comments)--

The first 4 lines are amazing

The willing suspension of disbelief, a parakeet.

You cook then leave dishes for the reader.

I prevent having dishes to wash by not cooking.

I eat nuts and cheese and berries, but what if I did not eat?

This suspension of disbelief, the beautiful parakeet, kept in its cage, shall not be cooked, the reader will not have to clean up but the reader is made part of the story and the writer is sparing the reader. This is no self-pitying story but "my fiance left me" and "what if I didn't eat?"--wearing the white swing coat meant for the wedding, the statement of not wanting to kill self now but ordering red wine instead, the descriptions of sex, it is as if the author is gossiping about her own life. The underneath of it all is palpable, mysteriously present. It reverberates after. Amazing to have created an entire universe in so few words. Poignant, funny, courageously and flawlessly written. Brava--Bobbi

Ann, thank you for directing me to this story via the sex writing forum. This is brilliant. I'm so glad you gave us the bacon/blue cheese but even beyond that scene so well rendered lies a richness in every twist and turn.

Ann,
I too came to this story via the sex writing forum. So loved this story. And via the sex writing forum, I found this sex worked so well, just right for the piece, specific without the identifying words.

Absolutely loved this line: “You don't like the word ‘cunt,'” my fiancé said judiciously. “I like it but not as a first name,” I said.